Recently completed video games

[mikemariano]

Snowed in and unable to go to work, I completed Earthbound.

 

It was my second time playing the game, I remember the endgame being punishing—and it was!  There's no real way to level up enough to survive multiple battles with the advanced Starmen—you just have to hope you don't get diamondized, etc.

 

There was a lot of story stuff I had no recollection of, too.  The end of the game has the main scientist removing your soul and putting it into a robot body.  This has no effect on the gameplay—you can still use PSI powers and aren't more susceptible to lightning or anything.

 

Then your robot bodies die, too, and you magically come back to life and spend a long time wandering the world, wondering what dialogue might be new since the game is technically over.

 

Then you finally return home to Mom, and you watch the credits over a slideshow of all the annoying photos that were taking throughout the game.

 

Then the game's still not over!  Pokey vows that you will face him again!  Man, it's been a long game; I don't want to do that just yet.

 

Should I move right on to Mother 3...?

[Tanukitsune]

Well, Earthbound is Mother 2, so you wouldn't be skipping anything if you played Mother 3. Isn't Mother 1 more or less the same game as Mother 2 anyway?

 

 

I guess i don't know all what was in there, but i thought

looked totally amazing.

 

I only played a handful of them, but now I've played them all and, I still maintain that they are very meh, it not even worse, but Perfect Stride was actually fun, my favorite of the batch was Guilded Youth.

[tegan]

I finished The Starship Damrey and really enjoyed it! I kind of wish it took greater advantage of the idea of your character having to remotely operate things, though. Like if there were instances where you had to use your computer terminal for things besides controlling robots. I also didn't really like how they went out of their way to explain everything in the epilogue, especially since I was super satisfied that I had pieced together the ending twist for myself ahead of time.

[Sno]

Starship Damrey seemed to me like an episode of one of those genre anthology shows, like an Outer Limits or a Twilight Zone. Just a really self-contained, bite-sized narrative asking more questions than it has answers for, with a nice little twist at the end.

[Bjorn]

Apparently tonight was my Blendo Games Introduction evening.

 

I played Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving back to back.  I feel like I must have missed the zeitgeist on these, and since then they have achieved an almost mythological status (in part because I hang out around here).  I can see what makes them crunchy and delicious.  And had I played either with absolutely no knowledge of them, I probably would have been delighted.  But ultimately they didn't really connect with me.  I think I just had too much knowledge and too high of expectations. 

 

I was feeling a bit let down my first experience with a Brendon Chung game, so I fired up Atom Zombie Smasher to see if I enjoyed it more.  Ended up playing through an entire campaign in one sitting (sure I was massively overwhelmed, but I did finish it).  That is some really good stuff, and between the good I could see in the design of GB/TFoL and the awesomeness of AZS, I do finally get why so many people are big fans of his.  I like it when I pick up a game like this and it scratches a gaming itch that I didn't even know I had. 

[Frenetic Pony]

Apparently tonight was my Blendo Games Introduction evening.

 

I played Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving back to back.  I feel like I must have missed the zeitgeist on these, and since then they have achieved an almost mythological status (in part because I hang out around here).  I can see what makes them crunchy and delicious.  And had I played either with absolutely no knowledge of them, I probably would have been delighted.  But ultimately they didn't really connect with me.  I think I just had too much knowledge and too high of expectations. 

 

No worries, didn't get Thirty Flights either. It's some sort of philosophical deconstruction of game and story mech- you know what I don't even know what the fuck I'm saying. Which is probably why it wasn't for me, even though I liked other odd/no objectives/deliberately offbeat games like Jazzpunk and Dear Esther.

[Tanukitsune]

I just completed Infected: The Twins Vaccine and while it has higher production values that your average "Interactive Hidden Object Game" (a.k.a. like an adventure game only with all the stuff you hate about them), this when from bad to hilariously badly designed pretty quickly.

 

I actually laughed audibly at the ridiculously convoluted and dumb puzzles the game had. You keep throwing away items you'll need later, so you need to find a new one, but this one is just hilariously bad...

 

In one area, you need to get rid of some rubble, that you could easily climb over anyway, by the way, how do you do that? WITH DYNAMITE! Obviously this creates a fire that you can't just walk over either, so you need to turn off the sprinklers... the room you get the button to turn them on is the best puzzle in gaming history!

 

It's frozen in ice, so you take the CHISEL, which you use with a HAMMER on the wall (DUH!), to get a BOX-CUTTER, to do a bunch of stupid things.... to make HOT SOUP to melt the ice!

 

VIDEO GAMES!

 

This might be my new favorite "best worst" game, because boy has it made appreciate better and more coherent puzzle design.

[ariskany_evan]

Finished up Rouge Legacy.  I needed a game to play and not think about things including the game itself, and this absolutely hit the mark.

 

Took me about 16 hours, which for this style of game felt too long.  Definitely went stale by the end, but that just may be my having over-leveled.  The whole aspect of winning by attrition appeals to my timid/addictive personality, but undermines some of the feeling of accomplishment.

 

On to Gunpoint!!!

[Ucantalas]

Last night I finished Hotline Miami.
This game is beautiful. The visuals are amazing, the music fits everything so well, and the gameplay itself is... for lack of a better term, "tight". It's a bit difficult until you really get in a flow with the game. Once you go complete tunnel vision and nothing beyond the game matters, thats when you really open up the possibilities.

Every level felt like some lo-fi top-down version of an incredible action sequence from some kind of high budget action movie. Everything it did, it did well, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing it.

[Tanukitsune]

Wow, I didn't expect to beat Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge that quickly, but then again, it's more or less a remake of Phantis, so the length is more or less the expected.

 

The soundtrack is from Jake Kaufman, so it's awesome and it's more or like Phantis, an old ZX Spectrum/Amstrad game, with a new look, plot... It's really weird... I guess this is the fan version of "Phantis Nº 9" if you catch my drift. It's clearly Phantis, but he clearly didn't have the rights to the game, so he changed enough to not get sued?

 

Anyway, since it's based a late 80's Spanish video game, when nearly all covers looked like Heavy Metal albums, well... she wears a "space bikini", which is what Phantis wore. I don't care what people will think, this is a game where a space girl kicks the royals jewels of a prince for telling her to get back into the kitchen on a space social network... *shrugs*

[Frenetic Pony]

I played Atom Zombie Smasher

 

And I'd really like it if it didn't give you totally unwinnable scenarios. "Here, have some snipers (long range but very slow), mines (decent enough but limited), and fucking road blocks (road blocks) to kill 200 zombies in 30 seconds. Yaaaayy...  fuck you game.

 

I get that it's randomly generated, but at least on a level 4 outbreak you'd think at least the roadblocks would be disabled.

[osmosisch]

You're trying to win the campaign, not every battle.

[TychoCelchuuu]

It's a roguelike-like strategy game, you definitely need to accept that sometimes things won't go quite as well.

[Frenetic Pony]

It's a roguelike-like strategy game, you definitely need to accept that sometimes things won't go quite as well.

 

Oh I can accept defeat, I just get pissed off at the impossibility of winning. I actually like when its really difficult, just by incident. Sitting there an optimizing until I get it right in a bad scenario is great. Being presented with literally no way to win at all, that just feels bad.

 

I'm also replaying The Witcher 2 with the "Full Combat Rebalance" mod. While it makes the Quen mod into not a cheat, I'm not sure if The Witcher 3 will be terribly deep in its combat if its like this. Run up to an enemy, hit, run away, repeat adnauseum. It's still a great story though, and since I never quite beat it the first outing I'll make sure to do it this time to carry a save over to 3.

[TychoCelchuuu]

"No way to win" is missing the point. Obviously you can't win ever single scenario. The goal is just to save as many people as you can, or in the "kill zombies" scenarios, kill as many zombies as you can. As osmosich points out, you're trying to win the campaign, not every battle. It's like X-COM in that respect.

[Bjorn]

Oh I can accept defeat, I just get pissed off at the impossibility of winning. I actually like when its really difficult, just by incident. Sitting there an optimizing until I get it right in a bad scenario is great. Being presented with literally no way to win at all, that just feels bad.

 

Are you still in your first game?  Until I lost my first full campaign, I didn't realize that when you start a new game after the first time, there are a ton of modifiers you can apply.  Some to make the game easier (like an extra merc) and some to make it harder.  But some of them seemed like they would just level off the randomness of it some, like guaranteeing that you always have at least one offensive unit.

[Bjorn]

I've been trying to work through some of the smaller/shorter games in my backlog over the last couple of weeks.  Played straight through Thomas Was Alone this evening.

 

:tup: :tup:

 

It was just a joy from start to finish.  I knew next to nothing about it, other than the art style, so the whole experience was a really pleasant surprise.  It's the perfect length to play through in one evening (3ish hours).  The puzzles and platforming were mostly easy, but that was actually nice.  It had a zen quality to it of moving through each level without ever feeling stressed.  It also does story telling and characterization better with a single narrator than a lot of AAA games do. 

 

Also, browsing through the Steam forums on it, saw this link that a theater group at UT in Austin is doing a stage adaptation of it this spring.  So that's neat.

[Trip Hazard]

I finished Dear Esther a couple of days ago. It only took 70 minutes, but I'm not complaining; if a game goes on for more than about 5 hours I won't finish it. When I was younger I'd finish every game, but now I just have fuck all patience. Anyway, Dear Esther was great. Imaginative and evocative scenery, a haunting soundtrack, and some excellent voice acting. My only complaint is that I was too busy gawping at stuff to fully take in what the narrator was saying to me, and I didn't have subs on - thinking that they would detract from immersion - so I don't have a clue what was going on, really. I'd have liked a journal of some sort so I could refer back, but it's a minor gripe.

[Tanukitsune]

I finally completed the iOS version of Ghost Trick, while playing it on an iPod wasn't as comfortable as a portable gaming system, it was better than nothing.

 

The game did kinda lagged at the beginning since it felt like everything was dragging and nothing seemed to connect or make sense... but soon after the thread wove themselves perfectly to make an ending close to 999 good, specially in the sense it wraps up perfectly.

 

Also, MISSILE! Missile is a top Pomeranian!

 

I suspected the hero was really the cat when I noticed Lynne shot in the direction of the basket where the cat was even before the radiation explanation, simply because he died at the exact same spot Yomiel died.

I must admit I was wrong in suspecting "Ray" was Yomiel, helping him because he wanted Lynne arrested and not dead. The Old Missile thing caught me off guard but made sense in the end.

[tegan]

 

So the last time I played Metroid: Other M back in 2011 or so, an unfortunate glitch prevented me collecting a single missile expansion in the postgame due to a door not unlocking. This time through I almost ran into the same situation when I realized that I had missed a missile tank in the very first room in the game and that the extremely short elevator to get back there was permanently locked, but I ended up taking a long route across a good chunk of the spaceship and getting it. Hooray!

[elmuerte]

simpsons

[tegan]

simpsons

Season nine, to be precise.

 

I considered cropping the photo because I know it's super distracting, but meh.

 

 

(The disc upside-down on the Other M box is the Metroid Prime trilogy for Wii)

[elmuerte]

hint: the bottom part of the disc contains the protective layer, scratch the top and the disk is ruined.

[ariskany_evan]

Finished up Gunpoint.  Such a perfect thing.  The puzzles felt complicated enough that I had to put some thought into it, but easy enough that the flow moved unbroken.  The way it felt in the hands was brilliant.  Pulling off a complicated maneuver on the first try was super satisfying and always felt earned.

 

And the length!! If the market is going to be flooded with so much good content, the games need to be shorter, otherwise I will always be 20 feet deep.  Tom Francis did such a good job!

 

On to Dust: A Tail on PCP.  howlongtobeat.com is telling me 9.5 hours.  Seems a bit long for a side-scroller... We'll see!

[Reyturner]

Mother. Fucking. Dark Souls *.

*No I didn't beat Manus or Kalameet but I saw credits roll so it counts